Hippies Won the Culture War

W. J. Rorabaugh,
professor of History at the University of Washington in Seattle, is
the author of American
Hippies (Cambridge University Press), which offers a brief
overview of the Sixties counterculture and its legacies. He can be
contacted at rorabaug@uw.edu

As blue jeans,
beards, body adornments, natural foods, legal marijuana, gay
marriage, and single parenthood have gained acceptance in mainstream
American society in recent years, it is now clear that the hippies
won the culture wars that were launched nearly fifty years ago. It
was in the mid-1960s that one of America’s oddest social movements,
the hippies, suddenly appeared. This counterculture of psychedelic
drugs, rock music, and casual sex had its roots in the gargantuan
size of the baby boomer generation, in youth’s churning hormones,
and in the arrival of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD or “acid”).
The Sixties counterculture, its beliefs and practices, its odyssey
into the Seventies, and its many legacies as it became integrated
into mainstream culture help explain the United States today.

Hippies, almost
all of whom were white and middle-class, owed a lot to the Beat
Generation. In the Fifties the writers Jack Kerouac and Allen
Ginsberg promoted an alternative lifestyle outside the middle-class
“rat race.” Like the Beats, hippies smoked marijuana, grew
beards, indulged in a lot of sex, and rejected mainstream values, but
the new generation also marked itself as distinct. Taking LSD in
prodigious quantities, freaks preferred rock to jazz and wore
bright-colored clothes. Far more numerous than the Beats, hippies
dominated entire urban neighborhoods, such as the Haight-Ashbury in
San Francisco and the East Village in New York. Unlike the gloomy
Beats, hippies were exuberant. Large numbers made these youthful
rebels optimistic that the entire society would eventually join the
counterculture, and in a way it did.

At the heart,
the counterculture was about three things: a search for
authenticity, an insistence upon individualism, and a desire for
community. Although hippies disagreed about many things, they shared
a desire to be authentic. Being true to one’s self meant rejecting
middle-class culture in order to “do your own thing.” A
spiritual search was often part of the quest. Deeply suspicious of
both society and government, freaks embraced individualism as a true
expression of authenticity. However, this attitude left hippies
feeling isolated and lonely, which explains why the love generation
sought community. In the mid-Sixties communes popped up in cities.
By the early Seventies rising rents, racial tensions, and crime drove
hippies “back to the land.” Self-sufficient agriculture was a
hard transition for children of the suburban middle class. Most
communes failed when trust funds, parental checks, or welfare
payments ran out. Hippie women bore a lot of children. Rural
communes did enable residents to sort out their lives.

Psychedelic
drugs and rock music were accompanied by the explosion of easy sex.
More casual sexual mores, however, had been going on in American
society for a hundred years, as evidenced by the growing divorce
rate. Hippies merely accelerated the process. They declared their
parents to be hypocrites for preaching traditional values while
having many affairs. Free love would not have happened without the
birth control pill. First sold in 1960, it took several years before
single young women gained access. Once the risk of an unwanted
pregnancy plummeted, the double standard ended. Hippie men declared
that everyone should have sex with whomever they wanted whenever they
wanted. In practice, this turned out to mean that hippie men
indulged themselves, while women ended up discarded, heart-broken,
and depressed. Eventually, many hippie women came to see free love
as a male sexual fantasy that did not meet women’s needs. Some
hippie women became feminists.

Most freaks
were heterosexuals, but the attitude that sex was “no big deal”
allowed homosexual hippies to indulge in gay sex without coming out
of the closet. In that way, the counterculture liberated gay men and
lesbians, but this novel situation also produced anxiety. While
hippie openness about sex invited homosexuals to leave the closet,
many hesitated to do so because of harsh penalties that might be
imposed by authorities. This ambiguous environment took a sudden
turn toward gay liberation in 1969 when police busted the Stonewall
Tavern, a well-known gay bar in New York’s East Village.
Homosexuals astonished both the cops and themselves by fighting back.
The counterculture’s freer attitude about sex had a lot to do with
emerging homosexual openness.

The hippie
relation to politics is a curious one. The fact that longhairs
emerged just as the United States enlarged the Vietnam War in 1965 is
probably not an accident, and the counterculture all but disappeared
when Saigon fell in 1975. Freaks frequently shared the same views as
radical activists. Both groups dressed alike, listened to the same
rock music, and indulged in free sex. Hippies, however, were deeply
suspicious of all authority and did not share the radical desire for
bigger government. Freaks also thought that protests were a waste of
time. Some had become disillusioned after participating in
demonstrations. Of course, long hair mocked a war in which the
military insisted that soldiers wear short hair. Refusing to consume
mass-produced goods sneered at society.

Although the
counterculture disappeared, it produced a cultural revolution over
the long term. In the Seventies hippie communards developed the
first solar panels to make electricity to run stereos off the grid.
Another innovation was natural food. Communes produced
pesticide-free fruits and vegetables, and urban co-op groceries,
another hippie innovation, often stocked only natural foods.
Finally, there is the strange legacy of the personal computer, which
freaks conceptualized and invented. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs
wanted to put a computer on every desk to undercut IBM and other
giant corporations that had a computer monopoly in the Sixties. The
first Apple was built in a computer hobby club in Menlo Park,
California just a couple of blocks from where Jerry Garcia had lived
only a few years earlier when he had created the Grateful Dead. It
is not an accident that San Francisco gave birth both to LSD space
cadets and to the high tech wizardry of Silicon Valley. At times the
past must be cast aside to see the future clearly. The Sixties
proved to be just such a decade in America’s long-term cultural
transformation.